Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Without getting into the whole ugly mess, one thing stood out as especially alarming: In order to keep jobs from leaving the country and to bring tax revenue back to the US, Hillary will appoint a special prosecutor.
As more of her Stalinistic plan unfolds before us, the grim reality is that all Americans (are racist) but an expanding army of prosecutors will be deployed to govern the actions of American Corporations and small businesses.Here is the NPR "Fact Check" link that goes through the debate word for word.
It is quite annoying, but we have entered an age of opinion journalism where every utterance whether serious or in jest must e subjected to a fact check by one or more of the chain-dogs of the political establishment.
I believe Trump was rattled, but the shrew helped illustrate his points: she is self-absorbed monster with a vision for America that treats hard-working and successful Americans as inconvenient obstacles.
I do believe that for the first time in electoral history, the second debate will mean something. I hope that Trump completely unloads on her and summons the spirit of the late Rodney Dangerfield to destroy her once and for all.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

First, there was no way Hillary Clinton’s scandal plagued presidential campaign was going to finish off Donald Trump last night. The best she could hope for was to reinvigorate herself a bit. Trump on the other hand, had the opportunity to end the race it there but didn’t. In that regard, I think it has to be viewed as a missed opportunity for Trump, and therefore a ‘win’ for Hillary.

It was her venue, and her format. It’s the thing that she does best and until last night, he had never done at all. She had a moderator willing to put a little thumb on the scales, and a sympathetic blue state crowd. Trump was doing this for the very first time. I think both campaigns will come away from it competitive, but it will cost Trump some momentum.

More than anything it was like couples therapy. “Shut up and listen to your husband” is something couples therapists have said… never. It’s an industry run by women that embraces the post-feminist worldview, and is designed to do nothing but explain to men in something resembling rational terms, what they’re doing wrong. It’s a frame adjustment that starts and ends on the women’s point of view. Lester Holt was a less bias woman than he could have been, but he was still very much a chick, like all men in the mainstream media. He had to give it a bit of Candy Crowley just as insurance. But I don’t think it made much difference.

Trump’s biggest opponent last night was Trump. He was all of the worst of who he is, and none of the best. He let Hillary bait him into being defensive about his accomplishments which was a huge mistake when the time could have been spent talking about her emails, which were more or less ignored. When she said everyone suffers from implicit bias he should have interrupted and said “are you saying everyone is a racist?”

All missed opportunities.

With all that said, I don’t think he’ll make those mistakes again. I think the next Trump will keep a tighter control of his frame, and do much better at controlling the direction of the conversation. What’s more, I think Hillary knows how lucky she got. She gave it her best and did well, but she didn’t have to contend with her worst fears. There was that single moment when the emails were mentioned and she took on that rictus grin of a woman caught red handed, but it only lasted a moment. It could have been a whole night like that but Trump couldn’t close it.

He was FAR too defensive about his business and his wealth. That was by far his biggest mistake. His entire pitch for his tax returns should have been “Right now I’m a private citizen with a responsibility to my company and it’s employees. Since that’s so, I will heed my lawyers advice on this and wait till the audit is over, unless Hillary releases her emails in which case I’ll go against my lawyers advice and release them right away.” That’s it. All the defensiveness and apologizing just makes it look like Hillary is onto something.

And it’s also worth mentioning what last night was not. The traditional way the aftermath of a debate goes is that the Republican is compelled to provide specifics, and the subsequent few days are spent with the media using all that rope to strangle him. They spin, spin, spin, spin, spin until he’s too tangled to continue to fight. This is why they want Trump’s tax returns. They want to pour over it to make him look bad. He’s smart to not release it. Even his vagueness about his policies would be a strong position if he were just a bit more strategic about it and less flailing.

That dynamic didn’t occur with Trump last night, bot the positive and the negative. The press has no new ‘gotcha’ line to hang him with. In that respect the debate against the media went pretty well for him because it denied Hillary a great number of her foot soldiers, who all still don’t know what to do with Trump.

But if he wants to finish her, he’ll need to be better next time. He needs to stop hearing her, stop responding, and start leading the conversation. It should never be about him, only her. He should quit worrying about promoting himself and instead, act as our advocate to expose her. The press never will, and if he does, it will increase the level of public confidence in him. It will make him look honest – something we never think a politician is. And I think that’s the thing that will help undecided forgive his ‘big picture’ view.

Trump was obviously running on all instinct, with only a minimum of prep. That’s fine, and now that he understands what to expect and has the tapes to go over, he’ll do better next time. Hillary is good at making her case in couples therapy, and will easily persuade the sympathetic moderator. Trump needs to remember that this isn’t the conversation he should care about. It isn’t about him, it’s about her. He should see it as him and the American people against Hillary and the press. That's actually the argument, and if he can have that conversation with the folks at home, he can very much still pull this out.

Last night I heard no fat lady. And that means it’s still anyone’s ball game.

PS – For those of you in the know, I sent an email to friend of the blog VV last night to mention how much Trump's performance reminded me of our common friend Jose. If you know him, I think you’ll know precisely what that means.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

I’ve got to confess, I’m a little concerned. I’m not very good at gauging public opinion, because I don’t feel like I have very much in common with the average man on the street. Whatever my actual abilities, I was raised by a perfectionist to be a perfectionist, so I end up holding myself to an unachievably high standard. And although I’ve accomplished a fair amount in my life I tend to emotionally overinvest in my failures, and then continue to persevere only through force of will and determination.

I’ve come to understand that this is a common attitude among ‘type A’ overachievers. But since most people are not ‘type A’ overachievers, I’ve never felt like much of a ‘regular guy’. I’ve been told that I don’t come off as one either, by both friends and adversaries, so there's some objective verification such as it is. And that leaves me a bit short in understanding how the average guy actually thinks because his attitude is a foreign one to me. I just can’t directly identify.

This is the main reason I’ve spent so much time studying decision making. I have a pretty robust and scalable model for it now I think, and in the markets, I’m pretty confident I understand things. But that tiny sliver of behavior is pretty much where my expertise ends. When it comes to political decision making, it’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. Which brings me to Skittles-gate.

Not having a twitter account, I hadn’t heard of the issue until I finally got around to this weeks radio Derb. But to me, Don Jr.’s Skittles metaphor seems perfectly appropriate and beyond reasonable reproach. It has none the less received a great deal of completely unreasonable reproach. And to call the criticisms of it thoughtless is to be completely unfair to all future thoughtlessness.

As far as I can tell the lefts major problem with the analogy is that it’s actually a pretty good one, and describes the problem of widespread Muslim immigration pretty well. If a bag of skittles has three poison candies, who would grab a handful? But the scarier thing is that the style of the complaints about it speak volumes about who the left is and where there mindset is.

There really isn’t any other way to see this - these are desperate, panicked, deeply irrational people. They aren’t thinking, or reasoning at all, in any way. They aren’t even pretending to. If I were in some public venue and heard any one of these responses first hand, I’d be filled with a desire to check their body language carefully, turn my chair toward them so I could keep them in view, and check the safety on my CCW.

I’m not kidding, if twitter is any indication the left is really ready to blow. The dike of leftist equalism is squirting water all over the place in huge gushing streams and there aren’t nearly enough fingers to go around, so the horses are beginning to panic. And panicked horses can do enormous damage.

I remember the end of the Carter years pretty clearly, which is the last time this sort of thing happened, and the way I recall, it wasn’t like this. The way I remember it, it was more like the air going out of the leftist balloon. But this is a substantial number of people who seem to be ready for a complete nervous breakdown. Even cowards like liberals can be violent and dangerous if you get enough of them together – just look at the behavior of the scum in Charlotte. And twitter seems designed to bring them together.

For me it’s hard to identify personally with that. I’m a winner in the genetic lottery (in a couple of ways at least) so I like the idea of things being unequal because it means that I’ll be more likely to have the chance to outshine others. But for those people who know deep down that they are losers in the genetic lottery and they are faced with the fact that they may have to acknowledge that lack after decades of denial – man… they’re really terrified.

This is a paradigm I’ve written about before. Imagine being one of those 1 standard deviation below the mean black men and learning beyond any doubt, that your IQ is 15 points lower than average. In the modern world, how can your ego cope with that? The answer is that you will probably come to rely on the aspects of who you are that give you an advantage – your size, your strength, and your aggressive nature. Right now, Charlotte is full of guys like that staring down policemen.

Well this is what I imagine is motivating all leftists where politics is concerned. They can be rhetorically persuasive in spite of their failings in other obvious areas. But when that dynamic fails to provide the results you’re looking for, what do you do then? I don’t know. But if Twitter is any guide I can very easily imagine that for some significant portion of them, cell phones, pressure cookers and fertilizer may involved.

Equalism is a delusion. A fantasy generated by those unable to win in the ‘natural order’ where individuals are allowed to have an advantage over other individuals. And when this house of cards comes tumbling down, and it looks to me like it’s about to whether Trump wins the election or not, I think there are going to be casualties.

Which brings me to this post by Vox Day. Vox is a clever cerebral sort, who is unfazed by people accusing him of ‘hate-think’, which naturally makes me a fan. Here he cites some advice on surviving a riot, which I think is very well founded. The core of the advice is to be somewhere else, but failing that there is some thinking here which I find worth your time.

The best advice in my opinion is that ‘distance is your friend’. My only real exception to it is that I think these guys underestimate the affect on mob psyche of the sound of gunfire. If it comes to it, and you are forced to defend yourself, you aren’t going to need to shoot everyone. Most will decide that they aren’t as brave as they thought the second they hear the first report. If they can tell where it’s coming from that will be the moment they’ll decide to be somewhere else. And that will be your opportunity to clear out.

It’s right after a market crash that everyone is obsessed with market crashes, and it’s right after a riot that people are worried about riots, so I don’t want to overestimate the risk. But the Twitter-sphere has provided me with a window into the minds of a whole bunch of people who are so wildly irrational that I don’t believe they can cope with the failure of equalism.

But equalism is a fiction that is only preserved by ignoring evidence. And since the Alt-Right is changing the Overton window, it is GOING TO fail. When it finally does, if twitter is any indication, the people who depend on it aren’t going to take it well.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

The NYTimes has a video up recorded by Keith L. Scott’s wife, in which she claims, (and the NYTimes implies) that Scott was unarmed. The video does not make this clear since the shooting itself occurs outside the frame. But the police have a gun in their possession with his prints on it recovered from the scene. He has a history of violence, and multiple arrests. I’m unpersuaded by the Times video, but no doubt many people who need the lie of Scott’s innocence preserved will be.

For me, this offer’s a thin excuse to talk about something I’ve referred to (though not in print yet to my recollection) as ‘the black woman’ problem.

Most American black women are from west African populations, and to my eye, they aren’t very attractive. They are squat, very heavy, and typically less intelligent than white or Asian women. Individuals will prefer a wide range of appearances and I bear those who find west African women attractive, absolutely no ill will. But the standards of beauty are, for lack of a better word, pretty standard. The objectivity of a beauty standard has been studied at some length, and reported at many of the red-pill sites. I’d recommend searching for “beauty standard” Chateau Heartiste if you’re interested in specifics.

But taking that as a given, this leaves American black women in a bit of a pickle. Their standard body and facial features are a long way from what science indicates is objectively beautiful. Add to that a typically dim mind prone to emotional outbursts, and the poor risk management skills that go with it, and you have a recipe for the girl that very few men, if any at all, will want.

This is not an excuse to ungraciously call black women ugly. It doesn’t matter to me what someone I’m not dating looks like. But it matters a very great deal to the women themselves.

Ask women what is important in life and you get a very different answer than when you ask the same question of men. While men will often talk about careers, and wealth, a Ferrari or to surf Mavericks (or whatever) virtually all women will say that a ‘meaningful relationship with a man’ is VERY high on their list. Their huge biological investment in childbearing pushes them toward mating in the same way that men’s testosterone pushes us toward sex. It’s innate, irrational, overpowering, and driven by the part of the female mind that lends itself to rationalization.

Men are the pursuers, and women are pursued, so their half of the mating equation is to find a way to persuade as many men to pursue them as possible. This is typically done by being as physically attractive as they can. If you take exception to that statement, this is the wrong place to argue the point (I refer you again to the Heartiste). The point I’m interested in here is, what happens to a woman’s psyche, when almost no one wants to pursue her?

If you prowl around the red-pill sites, you’ll see a frequent reference to the “Rationalization Hamster”. This is a paraphrase of sorts, but I think of this as referring to the way that women, rather than lying directly to others like men do, find it easier to lie to themselves and convince themselves that the lie is the truth. And it’s my experience that the less attractive a woman is, the more outrageous the lies she tells herself become. One recent example you may have caught wind of in popular media was when Lena Dunham showed up at a fashion show recently, dressed as a man, and honestly believed that the attractive sports star sitting next to her, who could have virtually any beautiful young girl he wants, should have been attracted to her instead.

This is ridiculous on it’s (her) face. But if you’re someone who looks like Lena Dunham, you rely on these lies to preserve your fragile ego. And when it doesn’t happen the way you expect, you don’t look in the mirror as you should, you look to change society and redefine the things that men find attractive. But the very process of entertaining that kind of solution reinforces the thought processes that requires it. The more you do it, the more you require it. Before long, you are, in an objective sense, honestly believing something which to others seems ridiculous.

A great many black women are no more attractive than Lena Dunham, and many are even less so. So as a group, they have come to rely on their ‘rationalization hamster’ to a much greater degree than other groups of women who have a higher average physical appeal, and therefore garner more male interest. They cope with this difficult fact by constantly lying to themselves about how they look, and the nature of the problem. They get accustomed to the process. They rely on it for what they honestly believe is the truth. It isn’t the objective truth. But it’s as much of the truth as they’re able to handle, which in many cases is almost none.

Culturally this has become a cliché. “My baby wasn’t no thug, he was a nice boy with a good heart! It’s that raciss cop who done wrong!” What I believe you’re hearing at a time like that is a woman convincing herself of a falsehood, in a way that she’s probably well practiced at. No one can really fault a mother who has broken no law, for mourning the loss of her child, however clear the evidence that he may have been guilty. But just because his mother believes it doesn’t mean the rest of us should.

In this case, what I believe we’re seeing is Scott’s wife convincing herself that Scott was unarmed. She cannot face the fact that he was, so she doesn’t. The NYTimes, eager to show white men as the villain, repeats as much of this lie as they can without making themselves an out and out laughingstock. They are not interested in the truth. They are interested in shattering the power structure. They want to inflame blacks in the hope that they can then be turned toward supporting Hillary Clinton, who desperately needs their votes.

That kind of thinking may seem, petty and shallow – as if I don’t give the Times enough credit. Surely they would never be so craven as to openly lie about a man’s death and create a riot and potentially an out and out race war, just to support something as transient as a political goal in a single election. But if you’ve been following along, you can see that they view the rise of Trump as a challenge to their core principles. They are in full on, Gulf Of Tonkin, Blue Dress, definition of “IS” freak out mode. The core lies of their entire belief system are being challenged now everywhere they look, and more evidence pours in every day. Their tools for cowing the right, accusations of racist and misogynist, are falling on tens of millions of deaf ears. So they are going to shout as loud as they have to as a last ditch effort to make them work. And if that means a few riots or even an all out race war have to happen, well it’s all for what they think is a good cause.

They’ll say “We’re just keeping the question open” Or “We want all the facts”. But that’s nonsense. They aren’t idiots. They know the potential consequences of their actions. But when measured against the recent threat to their leftist worldview – a worldview that each and every one of them is deeply, personally, invested in, they just don’t care. Journalistic ethics? Utter BS. This is just a demand for blood.

Friday, September 23, 2016

With the announcement of 'no coughing breaks' as part of the debate rules for Monday, we are wandering into the domain of expertise for long time friend of the blog - chess.

Hillary is in a dark place here. She cannot afford a coughing fit like she has been prone to, and she cannot afford to be doped enough to avoid one by any drug I know about. There is codeine of course which is a common cough suppressant, but it will leave her glassy eyed and unfocused. There may be some other anti-spasmodic I'm unaware of, but I think they mostly come with side effects that may have a negative impact on her performance as well.

The go to solution for the Democrats has always been to rely on a compliant and willing press to only show the narrative the Democrat candidate wants, but the rules prohibit that in this case.

So chess - what do you think? What drug(s) will they get her hopped up on and what are the side effects to watch out for? Is this a medical problem that has a solution with a minimum of cognitive side effects? Or is she just going to have to go red faced and choke back the fit when it comes? And how much fun would it be to pump her full of Ketamine by mistake and see how it goes?

If you can throw something in the comments, I'll yank it and post it up here with the question?

%%%%%%%%%%% CHESS RESPONDS %%%%%%%%%%%

If she was honest about her health I could give you an idea. Besides boarded in anesthesiology I am also boarded in internal medicine.I know there was talk about a potential goiter and people said that was why she was wearing high neck collars etc. I would say that is more indicative of having a thyroidectomy. I would swear that she has a scar on her neck. A really good surgeon will find a crease in the skin of a woman's neck and then make the incision there so it can be somewhat hidden in the crease. So you wear turtlenecks for a few months until a lot of the redness is gone then you have a makeup specialists hide that scar when you are out in public.

All of this could explain the cough if one of her recurrent laryngeal nerves was injured during surgery.It is rare but can happen. It can paralyze one of her cords in any position. You can try to make it better with another surgery but she was in the midst of her primaries and I am sure didn't want to raise attention... She could have had a goiter that injured her nerves or a thyroid cancer that injured it. All the above sort of leaves her screwed.

A book a few years ago mentioned she might have a bad heart and/or valves. Some congestive heart failure from bad muscle or valve could cause severe coughing fits. In that instance the forward pump isnt working well and the blood backs up into your lungs and literally makes your lungs "soggy"which stretches a receptor and thus coughing fits. That kind of coughing would be even worse when she is laying flat at night or during day when she is really fatigued.

My money is thyroid nerve injury. Supposedly she uses desiccated thyroid which means her original physician must have been Socrates.She probably has to order that from some voodoo shop in Haiti or the Congo.

If she wins the election I think you will hear of some procedure being necessary either with some teflon injected into a chord or maybe a heart valve work. If its a a valve I think there would be an uproar.. In the real world if its heart her personal doc should be arrested. I think if she wins, anything after her hand on the bible oath is icing on the cake.

And finally ....Watch her and bottled water. See if she turns away from camera to take a drink and what might really be spitting secretions she cant swallow into the bottle. They can try to dry her out with a drug called atropine which leaves her mouth really dry but tolerable for a few hrs. Thats the path I would take. It doesn't affect mental function. Sorry. All this should be public knowledge.
Tom . Besides all of this she has at least 3-4 other things that are good to have ie blood clots etc.Every time she flies puts her at risk even on coumadin ie rat poison. 5% of people per year will have a bad bleeding experience on coumadin,. Nasty drug.

The last thing I would also toss in is that witha injured vocal cord you cant move it. When we swallow something and some of it hits the cords they slam shut to protect your airway. Every now and then the cords will spasm for a few seconds which makes you a little nervous until they open up. If her cord is injured she cant protect her airway and so some food etc can get into your lungs and cause an ASPIRATION PNEUMONIA. Voila!!!

Her camp did a very good job of centering the focus on her pneumonia and not the potential cause. of that pneumonia.

This is a blurb about one of my pet peeves. The psychoanalysis industry is in my opinion, a total and utter sham. It is a baseless, useless excuse for wasting money. A great steaming pile of dog sh!t thrust in the face of America as a replacement for rational thinking. There are no lessons provided, no tools, no fixes. The only thing anyone ever learns from it is that they need a lot more therapy. No one ever seems to recover from it.

(When I said this across the kitchen table this morning to the lovely young girl I’m involved with, she instantly blurted over her coffee cup “Unless they’re in prison. If they’re in prison they can be instantly ‘cured’ and are now ready for release.” … The force is strong with this one I think.)

That’s why I think this piece from Slate is so much fun. Apparently Trump is causing a mini-boom in the psychoanalysis industry in all liberal areas:

To this I say … “GOOD!” For too long we’ve been wrapped up in the self indulgent, self-reinforcing neurosis of liberalism. We’ve pretended that we can remake the shape of the universe to fit the twisted view of dissatisfied middle aged housewife’s who can’t cope with their own angst. They are told a pretty lie by feminism, and when it turns out to be not true, rather than accept that fact and cope with it, they try to change every other aspect of society until it’s somehow made true. But there is always another persistent fact that won't conform to political persuasion - always one more uncomfortable human truth that won't go away. And it's this persistence that talk therapy uses to skim its graft from a weak minded and unsuspecting public.

That mental process – the process of self delusion, is never a healthy one. And it can’t be turned into something healthy by ‘raising awareness’ or spending money on scam artists. If you’re gay, you are not normal, you are different. You need to be strong enough to cope with that ‘difference’ in the face of a society that see’s you that way. If you’re a 35 year old single woman who can’t seem to find the right man, it’s you, not all the “him’s”. And you need to start being more modest in your self assessment, and if you’re American, probably lose some weight. If you’re dissatisfied suburban housewife, maybe it isn’t society’s problem it’s yours. And you need to start to value the correct things.

Liberal America needs to wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that their problems won’t ever go away if they can’t summon the strength to face them. And they are not caused by Trumps rise in the polls.

Trump is not a monster, he’s a man. An imperfect man to be sure, but no more so than the President who has made monthly race riots the unofficial policy of his justice department. The world will not end if he's elected, only your delusion of moral superiority will. And maybe that's the fact you really can't face.

%%%%%%%%%%%%UPDATE%%%%%%%%%%%%
From Steve Sailor's invaluable blog over at UNZ, I was led to this admittedly very wonky post by Andrew Gelman about the crisis in the Social Sciences, and the lack of replicability in the field. Technically Economics is a social science (though the way I and some of the hedge fund guys who are modeling to produce profit is more science and less social) so the problems associated with data analysis and skewed research is something I know quite a bit about. I'll grant you, many of the specific complaints escape me, but the causes of the problem to me are well known.

The adage that 'you can make the data say anything' is true as far as it goes. But it's only true if you want it to be. In the hedge fund world the goal is to generate a profit so there is little room for error. But that doesn't stop anyone. I've interviewed dozens of people with obvious flaws in their research. Some were just inexperienced and didn't see their own errors, but others did see them. And I have to believe that those people all thought they could 'fix it later' after they got the very coveted job of "Portfolio Manager". Some people were not very smart, or just wrong (which is no sin). Others were liars who were trying to fool me and the rest of the financial industry into believing what they wanted us to in order to achieve their own goals.

As an outsider, it seems to me that there should be very few 'surprises' in social science. We all live in society after all, and deal with others every single day. We know what people are like and what drives their decisions. If there are any true surprises, it should involve small issues, and they should expose small truths. But small surprises don't come from agenda based research. Big, huge, massive surprises come from it that contradict huge portions of the accepted truth - unless of course you already buy into the agenda driving the research in the first place. Then the results that come from agenda focused research aren't surprising at all. On the contrary, they are only the most reaffirming results of what you believed you already knew.

The point of the wonkish piece, is to illuminate the weaknesses of theoretical social psychology, but those issues are part of the foundation of talk therapy. People performing talk therapy for a living aren't going to question work which is largely incorrect while in the process of monetizing it. To them, with their income on the line, there is really no reason to believe anything other than the deeply dubious claims of an industry which has completely lost it's way.
And the two biggest cracks in this foundation come from Feminism, and race based studies. The idea that men are equal to women in all ways and that one race and culture is equal to another race and culture, are both obviously untrue. You can't have good science which is based on bad science. It will only lead to greater and greater error, that requires bigger and bigger lies to preserve.

In that light, something like the riots in Charlotte or the entire 'Black Lies Matter" movement were all inevitable.

There is an element of Black America, a small element I grant you, that cannot see any motivation for anything other than racism. Common speculation is that they feel this way because of their own devoted hatred of white people, and this is occasionally supported by their own statements. Those are the people who are trashing all they can in Charlotte, and chasing white people through parking garages.

I’m told that every black man has at least one story of injustice. A good friend of mine nearly missed his graduation from Stanford Business school after being arrested in an airport on what he claims were totally fabricated drug charges. He’s my friend, so I believe him, even if I think there might have been a bit more to the story.

Cops, black cops, white cops, green cops, are people like the rest of us. They aren’t exceptionally intelligent, or by the standard I was raised, exceptionally brave. Some of them are lazy, some are genuinely stupid, some are brilliant, and some are industrious. But they all labor under the same incentives, the same risks and the same constraints.

Young black men commit a widely outsized percentage of the violent crime in America, and are somewhat less intelligent as a group than the national average. Cops know this. Stupid, violent people tend to operate more freely outside the law. They do more drugs. They are involved in more non violent conflict.

This is why stop and frisk (or as Rudy Giuliani called it yesterday “Stop – Question – And Frisk”) is such a fantastic idea. It puts a bureaucratic structure around that first meeting between cops and our most violent dangerous citizens. It provides a peaceful honest way for the cops to get to the truth of what is going on without unnecessary risk or force.

As a percentage, It’s my belief that there are more lawless violent young black men in our inner cities than there are cops who break the law. But the difference between them is that the cops will follow rules if provided. We have control over them. So Stop and Frisk should be correctly thought of as something we do FOR black America, not TO black America.

The numbers are beyond debate. When stop and frisk was used as part of an overall policing policy of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, murders in New York dropped 84%. That isn’t hurting the black community it’s helping them. And Racism is a poor motivator, for helping black America.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

I’m sure you can appreciate the fix you’re in. You can either maintain the credibility of your bosses and the people in your industry who can most help your career, or you can maintain the credibility of the American people who watch your broadcast. I think few envy you, but it’s as much an opportunity as a risk.

Your bosses have probably made their opinion on the topic very clear, but used all the wrong words to describe it. When they said ‘objectivity’ they meant it the way the New York Times means it – you should do all you can to make Trump look stupid and make sure Hillary doesn’t. But I think that’s a more dangerous position for you to take for the sake of your career.

Your bosses believe that if you control the narrative, you control the minds of the people. How has that worked out for the others in this election cycle who have held that opinion? For all the abuse that Matt Lauer took for the last ‘debate’ from your media peers, did his career suffer for it? Are there mountains of hate mail sitting outside his dressing room door every morning? I don’t think so.

You obviously know your business better than I do, but I’ll tell you something I learned after decades in a business that runs on credibility. All credibility is personal. If your bosses have read this wrong and they persuade you to take their view, you personally will be the one who pays the price. You could be viewed for decades as an irrelevant hack, propped up by powerful media executives to shill for them regardless of the truth. But you don't have to go that way.

I think the approach you should take is not to find the middle ground between Hillary’s position, and what you think the right should be saying, but between his position and hers. His position may be outside the lines for the NY Media, but it most certainly is not for a very large number of Americans. The Overton window has shifted, and real fairness would recognize that.

I’m not advocating that you take Trump’s side, only that you recognize that he has a legitimate viewpoint that is at least as worthy of your respect as Hillary’s. His take may inspire strong emotions among leftists, but it is none the less supported by a great many facts. And you have to remember, there is EVERY possibility that he actually wins. If you bash him for the sake of your bosses and peers, and he feels you’ve been unfair in your handling of the debate, what kind of access will you get? But if you approach it by trying to split the difference between his position and Hillary’s I’m sure it will be better for you in the long run.

It’s not unreasonable to believe that “Black Lives Matter” is based on fiction. It’s not ridiculous to limit immigration, or to make our immigration policies a reflection of what the American citizens want. It isn’t racist and Xenophobic to want the American government to serve the American people rather than the interest of those multi-national corporations who can afford to lobby for the free movement of people and a borderless world. It isn't a hatred of Islam to take a reasonable and thoughtful view of the difference between the Muslim world and the west, and to let our policies reflect that.

You don’t need to agree with we supporters of Trump, you just need to acknowledge that we have a legitimate view. Please don’t let us down. If you can manage fairness, then the American people can make the choice. It's not on you to do that for them, even if your bosses and the Democrats would prefer you do so.

I bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that because the cop in Charlotte was black and they found a gun on the scene (shown now in eyewitness photos) there is no valid reason for the wholesale rioting and murder we’re seeing there. What you don’t understand (but CNN will no doubt explain) is that the black cop was just serving his white masters - the real villains. To Charlotte’s black community, none of the ‘facts’ in this case exempts white people from the justifiable rage of black men, who are deeply upset over their oppression, and injustice. If you don’t read this argument in the New York Times today, I’m certain you’ll read it tomorrow. Charles Blow and Ta Nehesi Coates are no doubt slapping away at their keyboards as we speak.

And now that the sisterhood is finally ready to take direct control of the Whitehouse, we can finally do away with giving excessive weight to these ‘facts’ and be ruled as a people by what really matters, our individual feelings. All rage is justifiable so long as the person feeling it is non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, or can imagine some way in which they are excluded from influence by the oppressive white male patriarchy.

Someone once said that if women were in charge we’d have no wars, and that’s probably true because women are no good at warfare. But we’d have riots every 28 days.

These events in Charlotte are really just more of the same. A tiny minority of our black population is incapable of self restraint, and are all but consumed with envy, hatred, and rage at white people. They are not oppressed. They are infantile, illiterate and randomly violent oppressors, led down a path by a Democrat party and complicit press that fuels their hatred for the goal of obtaining political power over the rest of us. They are Barak Obama’s ID given physical form. They literally no longer need a white person to be involved in any issue in order to find white injustice. The very concept of law and order equally applied regardless of race, is more than enough to fill them with a desire to destroy.

And lets not kid ourselves. The other incidents stated as the cause belli for the “Black Lies Matter” movement were just as fictitious as this one. So how did Hillary Clinton and the Democrat party respond to them? She led their mothers to the podium at the convention in Philadelphia, to talk about how important it is to disarm civil, law abiding white people so that their lawless out of control sons will not have to conform to the white man’s rules.

Even that lie has died on the streets of Charlotte. A protester was shot in the head during the riots, not by police but by another protester. (at the time of this writing he’s critical and on life support – unlikely to recover) The police didn’t kill him. The police virtually never kill America’s out of control black men. They kill each other, and anyone else who is unlucky enough to come in contact with them.

There is no white on black oppression. Only the imagined slights of a group of men who are ruled by their feelings like women. Even calling them men is a stretch. They have no honor. They are incapable of respect. They are a lost generation who never learned how to control themselves. Indulgence and appeasement has made them the spoiled children of the most prosperous and fair minded society in human history. Calling them 'boy' was never more appropriate.

Their view is what the sisterhood has always argued for, and as a member in good standing, it’s what Hillary will bring us more of. The press will spin this of course, and find a way to blame it on white men, Donald Trump, or the Alt-Right. We’ll all be treated to endless essays about the legacy of slavery. But this is every bit a creation of Obama and the left. And a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to bring this kind of 'social justice' to a town near you.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

In Obama’s second term, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton authorized the shipment of American-made arms to Qatar, a country beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood, and friendly to the Libyan rebels, in an effort to topple the Libyan/Gaddafi government, and then ship those arms to Syria in order to fund Al Qaeda, and topple Assad in Syria.

Clinton took the lead role in organizing the so-called “Friends of Syria” (aka Al Qaeda/ISIS) to back the CIA-led insurgency for regime change in Syria.

Under oath Hillary Clinton denied she knew about the weapons shipments during public testimony in early 2013 after the Benghazi terrorist attack.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange is now stating that 1,700 emails contained in the Clinton cache directly connect Hillary to Libya to Syria, and directly to Al Qaeda and ISIS.

It's hard to top Warren Wilhelm Jr for timing. (That's his given name... he changed it to "De Blasio"). With thinking like his, I'd have thought Darwin would have spared us all his contribution to the discussion ages ago.

Monday, September 19, 2016

This morning I watched CNN’s Carol Costello interview 2 other journalists about the political impact of this weekend’s terrorism. I learned about how important it is to be nuanced, and cautious and not jump to conclusions. They told me how wrong Donald Trump was when he said that political correctness was hampering local police’s efforts to prevent things like this, and how horrible ‘profiling’ would be if we were to allow our law enforcement to do it, like they do in Israel.

Two Muslim immigrants go on murder sprees in the name of Allah and an active terror cell is on the loose in NYC, and we’re supposed to take these journalists (spit) seriously? The leftist narrative lies in a bloody heap at their feet, and they continue to scoff and eye roll at the idea that we do something else?

Hillary Clinton has already said that if elected, she would commit to importing another 100,000 people who, while they may (may?!) not be as violent, all embrace the same belief system and ideology that these two guys did. That’s an additional 2,000 potential homicidal maniacs per state. But remember, we’re ‘stronger together’.

“I’m the only candidate in this race who has been involved in the hard decisions to take these people off the battlefield” said Hillary. To which I screamed at the TV “…and to put them in your neighborhoods with Visas, EBT cards, and access to bomb making equipment.” Hillary, Obama, and the leftist ideology of preemptive surrender and wholesale Muslim immigration, is absolutely connected to the increase these attacks, and they have every intention of making it worse. It seems now that people are figuring that out.

The part that bother’s me the most though is the Democrat’s devotion to eliminating the 'messages of hate'. Both Hillary in her press conference and Obama a few hours later, mentioned using tech companies to eliminate ‘messages of hate’. We’re obviously supposed to assume that mean interrupting the communications of active terrorists, but that isn’t what they actually said. It could be they actually mean something VERY different.

For example, I have little doubt that this piece would be considered by many devoted Democrats as a ‘message of hate’. I on the other hand, view most of the Democratic party platform as a ‘message of hate’ toward gun owning, cisgenedered, heterosexual white males, and the founding principles of America.

One person’s hate, is another’s devoted principle. So who get’s to decide? I haven’t actually blown anyone up, nor do I ever intend to. So is that the metric we’re going to use? That actually argues for telling Mrs Clinton ad Obama to shut up since they are the party offering aid, comfort, EBT cards and pressure cookers to our enemies.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

I live in Manhattan on a quiet one way street that spans the line between the neighborhoods of Gramercy Park and Flatiron, about 4 blocks south and east of Chelsea Clinton. It’s an upscale residential neighborhood known mostly for the expensive bars and Restaurants on Park Avenue south, and the busy after work spots on third avenue. The blast on 23rd street could have been on the moon for all I knew. None the less, at about 2:30 this morning my phone went crazy when concerned texts and emails from family came pouring in.

I’m sure it seems like the location of the bomb at 23rd between 6th and 7th seems close to me for the uninitiated, but it’s the other side of the world. The character of Chelsea changes dramatically when you cross 6th avenue going west on 23rd street, and the blast location is a dirty crowded area – not the kind of place I spend any time. Drunks and junkies waiting for their methadone are more common there. And when the blast itself occurred, I was actually miles away in an apartment in the most expensive part of Greenwich Village – just north of Washington Square. The thing has really only affected me on paper.

Manhattan is both small and enormous. Yes, I could have walked from my place to the sight of the blast in less than 10 minutes, but about 20,000 people still live between it and me. So it’s hard to take this kind of thing personally. I don’t fear terrorism, or individual violence like the Islamic psycho from last week who attacked two cops with a meat cleaver. It’s too hard to be in both the wrong place and to be there at the wrong time. I have a small fear of riots, but now that the “Black Lies Matter” movement is losing steam, I’m less worried about that too. Tomorrow will be just another day for me. No need to react to this whatsoever.

The media will shy away from calling this Islamic terrorism because it will help the Trump campaign to do so, but we know it ain’t the Amish. We know that one of our two political parties thinks of this kind of thing as ‘the new normal’ and we should all just learn to live with it. But we’re following the pattern of the French, Germans and English, so we shouldn’t expect a result that differs from theirs.

Some of us saw this coming ages ago. And we can all see what’s coming next. All we have to do is look at Calais, or Paris, or Cologne, or any of the other places that Muslim ‘refugees’ have made their presence felt. Then we can then either embrace the ‘new normal’ of inviting murderers into our homes, or we can try to persuade a few fellow citizens to vote Trump. That may seem oversimplified to some, but in terms of what we can actually do, those are the stark choices. Accept it, or push back against it. And voting Trump is the only alternative that will do the latter.

It’s fine as those things go. And it leaves me in one of those agree and disagree positions. I agree tha the test Kahneman came up with and the conclusions he draws ‘may’ be wrong, though if they are, they are supported by much more in the book including biological reactions, so I think he’s no more wrong than say Newtonian physics is ‘wrong’. In that way I think Steve is overly critical.

I do believe that rationality is one of those things you can learn to do, and higher IQ people typically learn things better, so they are more likely to be able to learn it. But there is another element to the whole thing and that’s ego. We do not being life as inherently rational beings. And if you are insecure, you become more ego invested in your intuitive means of problem solving.

I had a developer who worked for me who was a perfect example. He was a brilliant engineer, and could complete defined tasks 10 or 12 times faster than his peers without sacrificing the quality of his work. But he also thought the NYTimes was the truth, and was a typical leftist in every way. He possessed some rationality, and used it often in his work. But in those areas where he was more insecure, like his Sexual Market Value for example, or other typically male status markers like physical sports or a ‘leadership’ personality, he was unwilling to apply that same rationality because it would reveal for him his position in the middle of the bell curve when measured against those dimensions.

That’s an anecdote, but if you think about the liberals you know, I’m sure you can find equivalent examples.

This also explains why there are so few rational women, and no rational feminists. Their insecurity is so overwhelming that their ego prevents them from using what rational skills they possess. I think the case can be made for an element of evolutionary advantage in that self-delusion, but it’s too complicated to go into here.

With that said, Steve is right of course. It’s an imperfect test, as all tests are. It points to an answer rather than providing one. But I don’t think this is enough to invalidate Kahneman’s conclusions and Steve seems to imply otherwise.

The simple fact is that not all liberals are idiots, but they are all irrational when it comes to politics. And to understand them we may need to appreciate how little ‘intelligence’ accounts for decision making in most cases. Thinking fast and slow provides what I think is an excellent framework for that analysis. And if Steve and I disagree on this point, I think I can live with that.

A hat tip this morning to team Trump and their acceptance of a "Game" standard. Women are irrational but predictable. They are emotional creatures incapable of self restraint in their decision making, and frequently do things where , if they were capable of being honest about it (most aren't), their inevitable excuse "I just couldn't help myself". What they will do instead, is spin up their Hamster wheel and rationalize away their reasons until it becomes something they can tolerate knowing without shattering their delusional self opinion.

That Trump is good at this doesn't surprise me. That Hillary Clinton is playing into it surprises me even less.

I've been a Trump supporter (if something short of an advocate) ever since he won the Primary. But at this time, I'd like to go on record and predict a Trump win in November. As they would say over at Heartiste (in a yoda like voice), "The Game is strong with this one."

"Preference cascade". Ding ding ding!!! I could hear the alarm bells in my head as soon as I read it.

Liberalism shows all the signs of being a spectacular cultural bubble. It's a fiction, it's hyperbolic, and it's getting harder and harder to convince yourself that there is any merit in it whatsoever, let alone be able to convince others. "Black Lies Matter" the SJW movement and Feminism are in the same spot that the Bear Stearns Mortgage Desk was in January 2007. They run around singing everything is awesome, but in reality the ground is evaporating under their feet.

This election could very well be the moment when the cultural bubble bursts.

If Trump wins, and now they all have to admit that he just might, we should burn their citadels to the ground and salt the earth behind them. An ignorant man can be trained to fight. A weak one can be made strong. But a coward can only ever disappoint you with his stupidity and betrayal. They are so used to bending over for the left, they don't know how to do anything else. I don't which of these Mike Pence is, but I think we're all going to find out.

I personally don't agree with the speculation contained in the last few posts. But hey, it's not exactly like I pay these guys so they can write what they like. For me, I think the only way Hillary Clinton leaves this election is is she's forced out (fat chance) or is carried out. With all that said though, being a continual chronic liar has it's disadvantages, and eventually even her sycophantic mainstream press will have to take notice.

I'm sure you've all heard that conservatives think like business men and liberals think like lawyers. Business men see a cost to every benefit and make trade-offs to get what they want. The truth for them is what boils out of that. How they feel about it isn't really relevant. Liberals think like lawyers, and for them, the truth is what they can convince everyone is the truth. Juries decide based on their biases, their feelings, their thoughts and whatever all mish mashed together. And there is no trade off, only the narrative. If things work out badly, then it's not the fault of the person who convinced the jury.

The press is very much like that. It's not that they're lying to protect Hillary, they're letting themselves be continually convinced that whatever Hillary says is the truth, even when the truth changes and contradicts itself from day to day. But that doesn't matter to them. They simply like the story her side is telling better (where everything bad is someone else's fault) and that's the end of the discussion. But they must be feeling pretty stupid right now, none the less.

Is Hillary really sick? Does she really have pneumonia? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else except Hillary and maybe her Capo-regimes. Does it mean she'll have to leave the Democrat ticket? Not on your life. One thing we all know (assuming you aren't a journalist) is that Hillary is in this for Hillary.

She's in a tough spot now though. In order to convince people she's healthy, she has to be in front of the cameras a lot. If she does that, the American people will see what a power mad, unlikeable old lady she is, and won't want to vote for her. So she has to try to strike a balance between exposure to the public, and hiding from it. Hide too much and she's too sick to be President, be in the light to much and she's too unlikeable to be President. It's a delicate balance, and she isn't known for her delicacy. I'm sure you think I'm deplorable for saying so.

Does this mean Trump now has it in the bag and Hillary is done? I don't think so no. I think he can still screw it up, but he has lots of reason to be confident. He has momentum, he has the issues, and he has Julian Assange waiting in the wings to trash Hillary with more evidence of her shameless malfeasance, every time she pokes her nose up.

To quote Monte Python, "she's not quite dead yet" but she ain't looking as good as she used to and the way forward for her is getting narrower, and harder to walk.

Monday, September 12, 2016

I think there is a good change by the end of this week, Hillary will no longer be the Democratic nominee for President. We will be looking at a Tim Kaine or Joe Biden leading the ticket by next Monday morning.

What will be interesting to watch is what happens with Bernie's supporters and his delegates. There is no way Bernie will ever be allowed on the ticket. He doesn't represent the power that be of the Dem party. In addition, the most solid part of the Dem base (blacks) are not going to vote for an old Jew from Brooklyn in any great number. Sanders can't win.... His supporters though (have to give them credit here) are zealous in support of him. The nastiness that will erupt if / when Hillary is replaced will be very interesting to watch, after the Dem elites pick their replacement.

Personally, I want Hillary to remain on the ticket, even though I would enjoy a brief moment gloating over getting my original prediction correct (though for the wrong reasons). She is toxic, even to the Dem base. Trump in my opinion (assuming he is not assassinated) will crush her except in the deepest blue states. A replacement candidate that is free of the Hillary taint would be a different ball game all together. Trump depends on blue collar white voters getting off the couch on election day. A Joe Biden isn't toxic to blue collar men and will likely get as many white male votes as Trump would.

The AP deleted the video as they refused to pay the licensing fees. Other have stepped up, paid the fee, and the video is back on Youtube.

I have been reading posts from the hardcore Left. They are believing and repeating the "walking pneumonia". This sort of reminds me of the sheep from 'Animal Farm': "Four legs good! Two legs better!" Or in this case, "Hillary has walking pneumonia! She is fine! Her health is good! Trump is a threat to America!"....

Today the press was running a vanguard of protection for "their candidate", Deplorable Hillary.

The Twitter feed diverted from the 9/11 ceremony to Hillary's Health after it was reported in a few tweets that she was "clearly having a Medical Episode", and exited the memorial ceremony. While it may take some digging, I was first alerted that something was not quite right by a tweet saying NBC reporters were instructed by the Clinton campaign to immediately cease from shooting any photos or video of Hillary. In the tweets that followed, reports that Hillary may have fainted, stumbled, lost a shoe as her security detail helped up and into the getaway van. One UK paper reports that the episode involved a coughing fit prior to the fainting spell.

As I had stated before, Hillary is not well. Her recent speech where you said Americans fell into two baskets (therefore all Americans are basket cases") her voice was shaky and scratchy and she noticeably "limped" off stage to hide another coughing fit. Strangely, those video segments are missing from youtube... She is unfit, unhealthy, and will lose the election...

*****

About those Truthers: Every September we are greeted with new hashtags and trends from the Truther realm. I refuse to repeat the hashtags but will remark about the components of a particularly moronic theory that involves the pre-rigging of the towers to collapse.

There are people to this day that believe clandestine figures entered the twin towers and painted the steel girders and beams with a mythical substance called "super thermite". The theory is that jet fuel alone cannot melt steel. Of course it can't.

I was recently confronted by a Truther about the supposed inside job. I played Devil's Advocate and asked the genius if he knew anything about metallurgy, blacksmiths, or metal forge principals. He insisted that "steel doesn't burn". I asked him then how did our ancestors enter the "iron age"?

Without bothering to read the commission report, the principals of metal forging apply. You need a heat source (fire) maybe an accelerant like jet fuel (which in fact burns at extremely high temperatures compare to gasoline), you need a continual fuel source like carbon (office materials, plastics, furniture, dry wall, etc...) and you need a steady but concentrated aeration.. to act as a bellows to stoke the fire. If the forge is uncontrolled, the likelihood that the subjected steel will melt and carbon properties of that steel will then continue to fuel the fire. But of course my Truther friend would have none of this... So I referred him to Popular Mechanics. This conjured up another rant about how "the media is in on it!". I guess science is in on it too...

This Trutherism spawned from wanton indolence is a direct result of decades of Liberalism and "panzyism" being forced upon the American male. We are being forced backwards away from science and into mythology as truth. Masculinity would demand science, anything less would have us visiting fortune tellers and therapists, kinda like sissyfied men and the cuckolding deified "housewives" of television fame. God save the USA.

Saturday, September 10, 2016

When #basketofdeplorables became the number 1 trending twitter hashtag and Hillary leveled her half hearted apology, the first thing I did was text my brother. He's deplorable too you see, and I’m sure he would want to know. My text to him follows:

And now the most satisfying of moments.... When the alt right does to a leftist apology, what the left has done to others for all our adult lives:

This shall henceforth be taken as an admission of guilt. Start the bumper sticker presses rolling.

That satisfying feeling is caused by my tribalism. I’ve been so sick of my tribe of politically like minded people being abused by the left. A right leaning pol say some tiny thing that can be misinterpreted in some way, they take enormous unjustified offense, he then apologizes, and the left roasts him over an open fire for it for weeks. Romney’s 47% comment, his “binders full of women” etc. It's a longstanding and common theme of leftist politics and polite (or dare I say effete) conservatives have been on the defensive because of it for years. But that isn't how you argue with an irrational woman. When women argue what they want is an emotional response, not logic, reason, and polite references to facts and data.

But the Alt-Right is different. The Alt-Right responds to insults from the left precisely as men do when talking to a silly irrational woman. “You think I’m a bigot? You're too stupid to know the difference you silly bitch so shut your yap and fetch me a beer!”

And that’s what I think the Trump campaign is going to do. They'll put a polite face on it while the punches are delivered by proxies, but they’re going to slowly turn this spit and roast the most charmless politician in generations in the same way that her people always have to their opponents. And Trump knows how to deal with women, so he won't go off message. He's going to get this one right.

Meanwhile the ‘pepe the frog’ contingent of the Alt-Right will use and abuse Hillary like a $2 Tijuana whore. Hillary think's they're 'deplorable'? She doesn't know deplorable. By the time they're done, being 'deplorable' will be downright fashionable.

And this feels good to me, even extemporaneous as it is. It’s satisfying to see Hillary Clinton of all people suffer this way. To see the left lose an issue – any issue in the culture war. It’s the tiniest little victory, but it’s been a VERY long time coming.

Hillary’s greatest weakness has always been her contempt for the ‘little people’. And now someone is giving her a smack right between the eyes for it. After decades of misplaced and totally unjustified defensiveness from ‘establishment’ conservative types, I can’t tell you how good that feels.

When it comes to the way our frame of reference skews our perceptions, Hillary Clinton deserves a special mention. She said yesterday that roughly 25% of the country is irredeemable - that they are basket of deplorables. These are strong words, but they are no doubt shared by a significant portion of her Lena Dunham shaped supporters. To them, anyone who refuses to be persuaded that their baseless opinions, supported only by their own feelings about themselves, are anything but the truth, really are deplorable. They are deplorable specifically, because they focus on issues (facts) which undermine their world view, which has been meticulously designed to shore up their fragile egos.

But when Hillary says it, she means something special. Hillary doesn't care about Lena Dunham's fat, ugly, rapidly aging ass. The only thing Hillary cares about is more power for Hillary Clinton. Left, right, those are just tactics to her. She'll say (and believe) anything you want so long as it gives her more control over your day to day life. And by control, I don't mean approval. What she wants is the ability to command, and have all we little proles obey. If a few eggs need to be broken to get her that kind of control, it's a price she's willing to pay.

Me, I'm a believer in individual liberty set against a more or less unchanging set of rules for government. In my view, most things that Hillary wants to do to me she shouldn't be allowed to. And when she tries, the checks and balances should prevent her from it. But that isn't the world we live in anymore. When we elect a Clinton to the post Obama Presidency, we invest her with the post Obama Justice department, the post Obama IRS, the post Obama FBI, and an excessively long list of other Federal bureaucracies with which she can torment and manage us. All of whom are no longer subject to outside review of control. Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson better think about THAT the next time they want to tell us how awful life under Trump will be, because there is no way those two won't be on her short list.

I don't much care that Hillary Clinton has insulted me, my friends, and like minded Americans. But I do care that if she's elected, one of her motivating principles will be to isolate and vilify 22.5% of the population simply because they disagree with her.

Trump, for all his faults, talks about treating all Americans the same. Black, Brown, Catholic, Muslim, whatever you like. One set of rules applied to all Americans. Sure, he wants to treat non-Americans differently, but that seems fine to me. If they really want to play by our rules, then they should take the steps necessary to join our team.

Hillary meanwhile, has very specifically called out me and 66 million other people for post election political vendetta. If the most powerful person in the free world really thinks of us as totally irredeemable, then how can we expect to have our rights and liberties respected by her? You may not like Trump, but he is going to be better than that.

Friday, September 9, 2016

I know something about failure. Failure in the real world doesn’t happen like failure in sports. It happens to you when you’re looking the other way. Failure isn’t about ‘missing the mark’, it’s about identifying the wrong mark. It’s about not knowing what you should really be doing, because you’re busy doing something else. It’s about correctly executing the wrong thing, and leaving the right thing totally undone.

By now you’ve probably all read the “Flight 93 Election” piece in the Claremont Review of Books. It’s a first rate assessment of our culture and the dynamics of our left vs right political debate, and makes the best case I’ve read so far for supporting Donald Trump. If you haven’t read it, do so. But I didn’t want to write anything about it until the intelligencia started responding to it.

The left called it “Stupid” for all the reasons you’d expect. What they offer in response is the very little more than the “Don’t be ridiculous” portion of their standard incrementalist argument. (This is usually followed by the execution of the very thing they called ridiculous, as soon as the last thing they wanted has become the ‘new normal’.) I would call this ‘sticking to their guns’.

But the right, in the form of National Review, is sticking to it’s pop guns as well. I say pop guns not because they are as intellectually bereft as the left is, but because their arguments, salient and cleverly offered as they ever are, are completely unpersuasive in 21st century America. No one buys it. They are not convincing. They are offering high minded socio-political arguments to what has become an argument about who we are.

NR thinks that the left has fractioned America by identity and turned the parts against each other. If this were really the case, then the last piece I published here could never have been written. A black man and a white man sitting together and socializing? Where’s his “justifiable” rage against my white privilege? Where’s my open disgust at his dark skin? That isn’t the line that the left has really drawn.

Where the left has divided us, and where all the corrupt intelligentsia mentioned in the CRM piece continue to struggle to keep us divided is by personality type. The left believes in emotion as a source of truth, and the right, or what has been called the ‘establishment right’ is clinging desperately to logic and reason.

These are more then decision making processes. They are the means by which our two opposing camps judge failure and success. The left’s policies fail by any logical and reasonable assessment of outcomes, but they don’t feel that way. They describe themselves as being on the ‘right side of history’ for the sole reason, that regardless of the outcome the policies make them feel better about themselves. “Mission Accomplished!”

The NR right, likewise fails. They point to the numbers and data which unambiguously support their view, and in the process, persuade no one who didn’t already agree with them. “Mission Failed!” they cheer, or to quote the flight 93 piece, “Our ideas were never tried!”. Same difference. The left fails on merit but manages to persuade none the less, the right fails to persuade but is correct on merit. And we all continue to talk past each other.

This is the biggest thing that the Trump candidacy has given us. He’s shown us how an arguably conservative view can be persuasive in 21st century America. “His basic position is correct” to quote CRM, but his presentation is all about emotion. As a longtime reader of NR, it seems to me that’s the ‘establishment right’s” biggest problem with him.

They hate his alleged inconsistency and his vagaries. They abhor his lack of Burkean presentation. They call him dishonest and ‘ignorant of the facts’, the same way they do a to any leftist politician. Rather than listening to him in the style he wants, they are applying their own standard, the very same standard that has provided them failure, after failure after failure.

The conservatism of NR is failing. It’s a withering vine. It’s influence shrinks by the day, not because of the Alt-Right or the left, but because of itself. They are looking at the problems of America and rather than seeing the real issue, they return to their standard measures of success and failure. There is no reason to believe this will ever produce anything except the same results. High mindedness and Burkean consistency no longer matters to America. No one is listening to them anymore. The dorm room Marxist analogy offered by the CRM piece, is tragically on point.

That’s how you fail. You correctly solve the wrong problem, because you're using the wrong measure to assess them. Trump may not be the right solution either, but at least he’s seeing and addressing the real issue. He’s making people feel good about America again. He’s convincing people who only know how to decide in the way the left does, and instead of offering the left's hatred of liberty and top down "we'll take care of you" maternalism, he’s convincing them to give Americanism one last try.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Debate might be a bit too strong a word to describe the political conversation last night that was hosted by Matt Lauer, but by all accounts something important happened anyway. The left leaning portion of the web is hyperbolic today about Matt’s modest efforts to ask Hillary actual questions about those issues which are haunting her campaign.

I didn’t watch the thing. I had a drink with a friend at the Soho House instead. It’s fashion week and he thought the place would be loaded with beautiful women, but instead it was mostly dumpy PR girls and politically aggressive looking wanna be 20 something guys in sneakers. Except for us. We were two business looking middle aged guys in tailored suits and $1,000 dollar shoes, having a discussion they no doubt found horrifying.

The Soho House is a private members only club, and my friend is a member. He’s also black, my age, close to my weight, close to my height, and very polished and professional. We’ve known each other for years. He and I were PM’s at a hedge fund together, and are extremely like minded on a ton of issues including politics. You could easily replace one of us with the other in many situations, and no one would notice, until they looked at the color of our skin. Which of course means absolutely nothing to either of us.

We talked Alt-Right politics and issues of race very loudly, and if the snotty looks and rolled eyes of the other people there were any indication, we deeply offended many (which was fun). It turned out that my friend had ideas on the topic even further to the right than mine. While I was talking about modifying behavior by treating anyone on the dole as something less than a man, he was talking about work camps and forced relocations for anyone who chooses not to get a job.

It’s strange the way things change huh? There were dozens of press and ‘entertainment industry’ people in the place watching these two guys openly discussing topics that they all think should be completely out of bounds, and doing so in a way that shattered all their views of how the conversation should go. Me, the Alt-Right Trump supporting racist (according to them anyway), openly laughing and joking with a black man, and he a black man floating ideas even further to the hard right than the Alt-Right racist Trump supporter.

We were both thrilled with our effect on the crowd.

This was a walking talking example of the shift of the Overton window, dropped right smack down in the middle of one of New York’s most liberal ‘safe spaces’. And while my friend and I were busy offending half the (universally liberal) media types in the Meatpacking district, Matt Lauer was doing the same to the rest of America by gingerly asking Hillary Clinton real questions about things she doesn’t want asked.

The web is all a flutter today with liberal horror and dismay, at the idea that Matt Lauer thought more of his personal credibility than sticking to the liberal narrative. That narrative, is all they have. And if the conversation starts shifting to include facts and information that liberals can’t control, they know their story and the power of their like minded politico’s, will crumble. That’s the reason for the ‘no trigger warning/safe space' suppression of speech thing. They need to keep control of the message, regardless of the facts on the ground. But apparently Matt Lauer, didn’t see his long term prospects being served by religious devotion to American liberalism, and the open suppression of free speech.

So the left’s only choice is to heap mounds of disgust on the media person who dares drift off the standard liberal line. That narrative: liberal=good/conservative=evil, is the only defense they have. If that levee breaks American liberalism and all that they’ve invested in it, will wash down stream behind the facts and statistics that the Alt-Right uses to define its views. The result would be good for the American people, but bad, bad, BAD for liberals. They hold the positions they do not because they believe in them, who could? They hold them because it’s in their interests, and the interest of their connections to hold them.

The fun thing about last night though was that the message is creeping out anyway. Those who decided to go to the Soho House last night instead of watch the ‘debate’ ended up being subjected to the same kind of changing tide of message that the TV audience did. And my friend and I looked so sharp and polished that the people in the club were too afraid to challenge us. For all they knew we were Studio execs or something, so they may need us one day. Instead they had to just sit there and listen while their worldview was loudly and unashamedly shattered. The most devoted of them may be calling us assholes this morning, but they shut up and took it last night. And for anyone who is less than a true believer, that's the kind of thing that changes minds. The message is entering the acceptable range of normal.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

For those of you unfamiliar with NJ politics when it involves the NJ Supreme court: The Court is so damn partisan, it will simply ignore or re-write laws at will. One of the more infamous cases was the re-election of Senator Robert Torricelli. A solid 'party man', Torricelli was cruising to an easy victory, which is expected in a one party state such as NJ.

However, 'The Torch' (as he was called) got caught breaking campaign finance rules (I will spare the readers here the arcane details). The media firestorm erupted so damaged Torch, he found himself way behind in the polls. So far behind that the leadership of the Democratic party decided he had to be replaced.

The problem was that State Law was VERY clear on the matter. The window of opportunity to replace a candidate (post primary) had already passed. The Dems were stuck with old Torchie. So the matter was taken to NJ Supreme court which duly ruled for the political party it served: Via one of the most convoluted court opinions ever, the law was over-ridden. The leadership grabbed a bolt cutter and a couple crow bars, opened the crypt of the former Senator, Frank Lautenberg, dusted him off, and had him on the ballot in time for the election. Lautenberg, even though pulling a 'Weekend at Bernie's', won the election.

A while back, I stated Hillary would not be the nominee. I haven't brought myself yet to say I was wrong. Honestly, I still think she may not make it to the election. The MSM can't hide her crap health and toxic sludge keeps oozing from the continuous flow of email leaks.

I think the elites of the party misjudged just how bad her health is. Frankly, I don't think they care how evil and corrupt she is (she is one of them). Hillary it has been rumored, has used cocaine extensively. Her heavy drinking is well known. I have a sibling who works in the medical field (PhD level) and deals with aging issues extensively. Per my sibling: Hard amphetamine use will age the body. The effects, even if the person stopped using, will generally start showing up in a person's later 40s. Essentially a person who is pushing 60 can in fact have an 80 year old body. Long term neurological damage also becomes far more apparent as the person gets on in years.

So lets say by the end of September, Hillary is looking like a lost cause. Does she get replaced? Is a Torricelli on the Federal level even possible? If Joe Biden was on the ballot, would Trump win?

Only the latter I have a firm opinion on: Trump would lose because Biden would be acceptable to blue collar white guys and black men. He isn't loved, but unlike Hillary, he isn't hated.

The Carter era was an era of compliance, when the world had gone stale. The debates were all top down, from experts competing to make the rules for everyone else. The Ramones were bottom up. They were the real cultural rebellion. Steve is right, when Johnny, Joey, DeeDee and Tommie showed up, it changed everything. It made it OK to be fucked up. It made it OK to think the world had gone to shit. It was diesel fumes, black coffee and nicotine, in a land of incense, stale flowers, and failed good intentions. It was just what American culture needed. Steve says the same about Trump and I believe him. He’s fighting the culture war that the right has been notoriously absent from.

He may be right, but as can be seen by the failure of conservatism, it isn’t enough. To control the direction, you have to fight on the cultural front. You need to scream triggers and hate speech into the faces of all the little snowflakes, and make them embarrassed to be acting so stupidly. You need to be more like Milo and less like Jonah Goldberg. KW once called Milo a Cretin. Joey and Johnny made being Cretin cool.

Deep discussions about Strauss and Hayek don’t change minds today. We need to keep it simple. We don’t need erudite composition and arrangement of the message, we need three chords played badly, and lyrics about beating on the brat. We need to do it with the subtlety of baseball bat.

In my opinion, a perfect target. She’s as unattractive a woman as can be, down to her core. And it’s that shallow vapid core that Gavin wails on. Everything is wrong with her and wrong with us for idolizing her. Not me and you of course, but the culture at large.

We need more rudeness. We need more insults. We need more testosterone, and less frontal cortex. Jonah and KW call those things a problem with Trump, but it isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. That’s what we need to be selling.
(Google the title of this piece when you can turn your speakers on.)

Sunday, September 4, 2016

What does the Alt-Right stand for? Are they for box cars, ovens and camps like the left (and KEvin Williamson) says? Are they for rolling back civil rights so they can have lynching, or back of the bus politics? Are they for keeping minorities “in their place” and getting rid of all the non-white people that are in America?
Don’t be silly. What they are for is laws which favor the citizens of the US over those who are not citizens, and the assimilation of a small number of immigrants in order to serve the interests of those citizens.
This Peter Brimelow interview says it better than I ever possibly could. I’d definitely call this a ‘don’t miss’ if you want to understand what the Alt-Right is about.

Donald Trump’s secretary may believe that’s how she’s held on to her job all these years, but I can all but guarantee that it isn’t really how she’s held on to her job all these years. Yet, John Fund buys that story hook line and sinker, because he doesn’t really understand the many different ways there are to get to a billion in the private sector, or how personality really shapes outcomes when it comes to executive decision making.

All the folks at NR, excepting guest contributors like Dennis Prager who already has a job, imagine themselves the heirs to the William F. Buckley legacy. They believe (or at least hope) that the world would be a better place if everyone acted a little more like the late WFB. But some people simply aren’t cut out for that kind of relatively stoic intellectualism. And that does not make them doomed to failure in any area, least of all politics.

Let me tell you about a few of them that I know, who have managed to make their small way in the world regardless.

Louis Bacon is a self made Billionaire. He has an irascible personality, is fanatically private, and as professionally driven as any man I’ve ever met. He worked hard and was very generous with the pay of his staff, but demanded a level of excellence from them that left marks. Saying his firm was a pressure cooker totally understates it. Take a pressure cooker, fill it with gunpowder and kerosene, turn the heat up to high and go at it with a pair of additional blow torches, and you have a vague idea of what a typical morning in the place was like. The saying was that it took a year to recover from working at Moore Capital. For some it took longer. I think my favorite LMB story summarizes the personality of the man very effectively.

One of the responsibilities of my team was to put together a daily book of research for the boss. It involved collating thousands of data sets and analytics from hundreds of different sources, and collating them into a few hundred charts and reports describing dozens of markets. These were placed on LMB’s desk every day in a large red binder, and were the very first thing he looked at when arriving in the morning.

I had one young technician whose entire job was to babysit the data set’s arrival, run the analytics, and ensure the reports were all up to date and correct. That’s it. That was his entire 6 figure job. He didn’t even have to print the thing, we had another guy for that. His expertise was in running the systems that performed all the work. And the fact that we paid him so well was testimony to both the complexity and the relative importance of that piece (really thousands of individual pieces) of research.

That kid would typically arrive in the office near the close of the trading day when the data would begin to trickle in, and stay until the research book was complete. If that were at 8PM he had a short day. If things ran poorly or if some data was late, he would often stay until 2 or 3 AM. If things went really badly, I would usually get a call at about 3:30am asking me what he should do.

One morning after what I thought was a smooth run, I went to the office a little late. On days when I knew we’d had an issue I’d be there about 5am, but I hadn’t had a call the night before and I was a newlywed at the time, so my morning ran a little later than normal. I sat down at my desk on the trading floor about 7:45 and noticed that LMB was already there. I knew this, because sitting on my desk was a piece of the research from the night before, torn from the book we’d delivered, with a red circle around a single missing data point - just a single missing dot, on a page with hundreds of dots, in a book with hundreds of pages just like the one I was looking at. And scrawled in marker across the entire page in large, red, angry letters were the words “What the F*** is this!” with an arrow pointing to the red circle where the data point was missing. And down at the bottom in equally angry letters, the initials “LMB”.

That missing datapoint, just a single number, was a tiny tertiary blip on an obscure currency market that wasn’t seeing any particular action. But LMB knew it should be there and wasn’t. That the guy I paid to notice such things had missed it was something of a miracle. That LMB caught it wasn’t unlikely at all.

The next Billionaire I met was Bruce Kovner, who was also self made. Bruce couldn’t be more different than Louis Bacon. He was handsome, charming, impeccably dressed and well cultured. Louis liked pheasant hunting and privacy, while Bruce preferred the opera and rare books. Bibi Netenyahu was his close friend, and at one point, Bruce was Chairman of the AEI.

Bruce was an inside the box, big picture guy who delegated responsibility, but (typically) not the pay that went with it. My job there, which had the same description as my job at Moore Capital, paid about 50% what I made at Moore, and gave me only a fraction of the budget. Other transplants between the two firms had a similar experience. Bruce was more worried about getting value for his dollar that LMB, who was only ever worried about perfection, and would be happy to pay to get it.

But the effect of this is that where Moore Capital would have a single brilliant person working themselves to death to meet the LMB standard, Caxton Associates, Bruce’s Firm, would have three people each doing a mediocre job in comparison, in order to get a similar result. This left his firm with less pressure, more employees, and more of an ‘office politics’ focus. LMB only ever wanted profit, and didn’t care if you showed up for work in a green tutu if you were making enough money. Bruce tended to favor the people he favored, whether they were doing a good job or not.

You could call that loyalty to his friends, or you could call it kindness (you couldn’t call it generosity because he paid so poorly). But favoring personal relationships and office politics over hard numbers, doesn’t always have the kind of outcome you hope for. Yes the culture was more genteel and polite, but it was also more backstabbing and you never really knew exactly where you stood.

I won’t get into my personal experience there, or the specifics of why I had to leave. It should suffice to say that when I did, I was running a wildly successful strategy producing the kind of results that most firms would have given their eye teeth to see. And two weeks after I left Caxton, Paul Tudor Jones did that very thing.

Paul Tudor Jones was the third self made Billionaire that I worked for. He was an eminently grounded, family focused man who waited in line for his lunch at the corporate cafeteria more days than not, just like everybody else. More than anything he encouraged frank and open discussion among his decision makers. He wanted to hear what you really thought not what you thought he wanted to hear. On this score he really walked the walk.

I once watched another staffer at my level of seniority tell him his ideas on the gold market at a particular moment were ‘idiotic’. It’s a big thing to call your legendary billionaire boss’s idea idiotic to his face. Say that to LMB and you’d get an earful, but he’d listen to your view and if you turned out to be wrong, it might get you fired. Say something like that to Bruce Kovner and no one in your family would ever work in finance again.

Paul was the Billionaire I most liked. He was approachable, easy to get along with, and had a measure of charm. He and I spent one quiet afternoon talking at length about hunting big bears in Alaska. LMB was a hunter too, but if I ever brought it up to him during open market hours, I had better have a way to generate profit from it. No one could even lay eyes on Bruce without a meeting scheduled and he tried to avoid associating with the underlings, so all personal talk was off the table.

Paul didn’t think that way. Paul was a balanced man with a balanced life, who thought ‘a life’ was as important as anything else. He was a man with personal humility who recognized that you make many decisions in life and a great many of them are going to be wrong no matter what you do. “Be less wrong than the other guys” says a lot about the culture of his shop. “Fail less” would be another way to say it. And if it weren’t the fact that I went to work for him 2 weeks before the banks ‘broke the buck’ in late 2008, changing the quant markets forever, I’d probably still be working for him.

So here are three self made Billionaires, who all work in the same job, but who couldn’t be more different. Their personalities and the consequences of their likes and dislikes, shaped the organizations they ran, but all were wildly successful. Bruce Kovner is the one who is the most like William F. Buckley, but his firm was the least well run, and the most inefficient. So being like WFB may have it’s genteel upsides, but it’s not the end all and be all of every situation.

And lest we forget, WFB may have been a brilliant mind, but he couldn’t get elected Mayor of New York City, and even Napoleonic Mike Bloomberg managed that. It’s becoming cliché to say but Mitt Romney did it the NR way and John fund very much approved, but Obama trounced him because that isn’t what drives American decision making anymore. So deep intellectual posturing doesn’t seem to me to be the clear path to success that the NR team wishes it would.

As I have often said, I have my problems with Donald Trump. But I think we’d all be better off if the folks at NR would simply recognize that in politics like business, there are lots of ways so skin a cat. And not everyone who wins, does it by being like William F. Buckley. Trump may be a bit garish to the beltway ear, but he is an effective persuader and understands media. He is fighting fights that the right has been afraid to fight on their own, and doing so effectively. So if we all need to deal with a little gold lame to get the right engaged in the intersection of culture and politics, it’s a pill I’m perfectly prepared to swallow. NR should start doing the same and quit pretending that it’s a question of political principles.